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It’s been fascinating to see how The 4 Hour Body has provoked arguments and disparaging comments in virtually every online fitness community. Typically it looks something like this:

Original poster: Hey, I am trying Tim Ferriss’s fat loss program in The 4 Hour Body, and I am losing a lot of weight. It’s great. What has been other people’s experiences?

Response #1: weight loss is a simple matter of calories-in, calories-out. If you want to lose weight, you take in less calories, or put out more calories. I don’t need to spend $14 to learn that.

Response #2: Who are you to be posting in our community? I’ve never seen you post here before.

Response #3: What is it with all these people posting about The 4 Hour Body? I think Tim Ferriss must be paying people to go around posting.

I’ve seen it in Reddit Fitness, and at least a half dozen other communities. As someone who understands online communities, and as someone who is new to fitness via The 4 Hour Body, I think it’s an interesting issue to observe.

Someone who had not been into fitness, perhaps because they haven’t had success with diets or exercise programs before, tries The 4 Hour Body, has success, and is excited and wants to share their experiences. The established community sees a bunch of newcomers spouting off about some counter-intuitive fitness information, may have heard some controversy about Tim Ferriss or the 4 Hour Body, and so rejects the new community members summarily.

I want to address just one part of the conflict, because it’s typically the first issue raised: the established community says something to the effect of: “Weight loss is simple, you either reduce calories in, or you increase calories-out.” That’s what they say, but what I think they mean is closer to: “You either eat less, or you exercise more.”

There’s two reasons why this statement is in conflict with the principles of The 4 Hour Body:

The 4 Hour Body fat loss program doesn’t require people to spend time exercising, although you can do 2 to 3 minutes of exercises before each meal for more rapid results. But 2 to 3 minutes of exercises does not equal 60 minutes on a stationary bike, or 30 minutes running.

Here are just a few of the differences:

The 4HB fat loss section emphasizes eating more protein, and no grains, sugars, or fruits. Protein itself has less available calories (3.2/gram) than is normally listed as (4.0/gram), and so it’s already a win over carbohydrates.

On top of that, the body directly excretes up to 1/3 of excess protein that can’t be used, whereas the equivalent in carbs would be more efficiently converted to fat.

By ensuring that people eat higher quality foods (protein, legumes, vegetables), they have more energy, and can more easily cut the snacking cycle. This may indeed reduce calories-in greatly, but it’s vastly different than just telling people to “eat less”.

The use of a high protein diet stimulates metabolism, increasing calories-out without the use of exercise.

Similarly, cold therapy stimulates metabolism and increases calories-out without the use of exercise.

GLUT-4 exercises (2-3 minutes of fast paced exercises) redirects incoming calories to muscle development rather than being stored away as fat, a term that Tim calls body recomposition. It is far easier to do and to sustain 2-3 minutes of exercise before a meal compared to taking 60-90 minutes out of your day to “go exercise”, and so most people wouldn’t consider this as exercise per say.

I would have to say I agree that many people have very set opinions about weight loss and when you do something against the norm such as 4HB you get a lot of negative opinions. I started using the Daily Burn to track what I’m eating and joined The Four Hour Body group. The people there have been great. Everyone is there for the same reason and there is a lot of positive feedback and encouragement. BTW Love your blog! Lots of Helpful info.

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William Hertling is the author of Avogadro Corp, AI Apocalypse, The Last Firewall, and The Turing Exception, as well as a web strategist and speaker. More about me.